I think a large part of it is that chemistry, for the most part, tends to focus a lot on what is, essentially, a single branch of physics. As a result you get lots of papers about creating a new chemical, or about the properties of a new chemical, but the fact that the majority of them have long, latin names and the fact that many applications aren't immediately apparent means that it just isn't interesting to the common person that much. That's also probably why even when chemistry does make the news it's almost always the applications of it while skipping over the process. You might see a headline like "NEW FUEL CREATED", but you aren't going to see one like "NEW PROPERTIES OF AMMONIA DIHYDRALE METHALATE FOUND" (just made that name up out of the blue, probably doesn't even exist). Even the basic parts of chemistry are rather esoteric. Just learning the basis of a chemical reaction requires you to be able to look at and understand a rather large chart of different elements, understand how valence electrons work, etc.. Physics, on the other hand, is basically doesn't suffer from either of those problems. The basics of physics can usually be drawn fairly well from analogy, which makes them easy to explain to those not in the know. In addition the results are usually things that people have been experiencing all their life, and as such are immediately apparent.
As an example if I was trying to teach someone the basics of how light works I might be able to draw examples of things like rainbows and mirrors that people work with in every day life. On the other hand pretty much all of the chemistry examples you meet in ordinary life fall under a different heading, "cooking". If I was talking about light I could speak about how you can do a variety of different things to light, like bending it, splitting it, combining it, reflecting it, and what exactly was happening in each case and how they made different things happen. In chemistry you're largely confined to "we mix X and Y and Z in a big pot, heat it to this temperature, and wait for a while to get W".
In physics we already know the applications, so the reasons why they happen are cool but still simple enough to be understood. In chemistry the reasons are mostly the same, and they're complex enough to not be easily understood, while the applications tend to either be so esoteric nobody but chemists can see them, or they are so big they overshadow the chemistry part itself. And all the simpler, common chemistry things don't even get known as chemistry, they get thrown about into other fields like cooking.
TL;DR: Physics is a broader field then chemistry, and it tends to be focused more on the how thing happen than the what that they are doing, which makes it both able to provide a wider variety of easily understandable topics, while providing new reasons the average probably doesn't know but can easily understand.
Author
Topic: SCIENCE, Gravitational waves, and the whole LIGO OST! (Read 516916 times)